The violence visited upon British Malaya during the Japanese Occupation of December 1941 to August 1945 has prompted several historians to evoke comparisons with the atrocities that befell Nanjing. For the duration of three years and eight months, unknown numbers of civilians were subjected to massacres, summary executions, rape, forced labour, arbitrary detention and torture.This chapter explores several exhumations which have taken place in the territory to interrogate the significance of exhumations in shaping communal collective war memory, a subject which has thus far eluded scholarly study. It argues that these exhumations have not been exercises in recording or recovering historical facts; rather they have obfuscated the past by augmenting popular perceptions of Chinese victimhood and resistance, to the exclusion of all other ethnic groups’ war experiences. As a result, exhumations of mass graves in Malaysia have thus far served as poor examples of forensic investigation; rather these operations highlight how exhumations can emerge as battlegrounds in the contest between war memory and historiography.

wanted me to film from up there on that tripod? As Gregory Bateson put it, in a dialogue with Margaret Mead, ‘a dead camera on top of a bloody tripod … sees nothing’ (Mead and Bateson 1977 : 79). Mead insisted on the opposite argument. The recordings of a camera in the hands of a cameraman were useless, since the human selection of shots and angles obstructed the camera's objective access to pro-filmic reality. According to Mead, cameras should be placed on tripods or else their footage could at best be described as ‘art’ – useless for analytic purposes. Art, Bateson

of this
‘suspended historicity’,18 human remains once again became bonesas-evidence when teams of investigators from the Khmer Rouge
Tribunal began recording afresh the sites of massacres, mass graves
and political prisons, this work having been started a few years earlier
by the Documentation Centre of Cambodia. In parallel with this rediscovery of the country’s ossuaries by western agencies, genocide
tourism began to develop around the main sites linked to Pol Pot’s
regime. In Phnom Penh today, one can hear taxi and auto-rickshaw
drivers mechanically reciting a

-scale interdisciplinary research programme partly funded by the
University of Copenhagen, Denmark. As part of its grand ambition
to develop the technical, methodological and theoretical tools needed
to transform the big data revolution into ‘deep data’ research, this
project has sought to make continuous recordings of social interactions on all smart-phone-based communication channels (call logs,
SMS, Bluetooth, GPS geolocation etc.) among an entire freshman
class (N = 800) at the Danish Technical University (DTU). At the
same time, a variety of other kinds of data have been produced

avoid pauper burials.24 Dennie traces raced differences in the treatment of corpses: until 1942, coffins for black indigents had detachable bottoms, rendering them recyclable; coffins for white indigents
were better constructed, lined with fabric, had handles, and, from the
1940s, a nameplate recording name and date of death. Even after regulations disallowed conveying black indigents on an open truck, they
permitted undertakers to convey and bury four black indigents at a
time, in contrast to the white indigent’s individual hearse and burial.
Most injurious for black

the mosques of Aarhus in March 2009 and has continued with several prolonged breaks until the present day. The most important part of the research, including the recording of more than 100 hours of film footage, intensive participant observation, and hundreds of conversations and interviews was carried out in collaboration with people from the mosques between April 2010 and October 2011.
My reasons for moving the project from Egypt to Denmark were primarily practical. As the father of young children, it was more convenient to do long

show the doctors and the people in the mosques the real reason he became so violent. During our film recordings it seems clear Aziz is trying to use me as a kind of truth-witness to the reality of jinn and magic. Filming in this way becomes another modality of participant observation – an enquiry into social life that does not only passively observe, but actively participates as a special and complicit form of witnessing (Marcus 1998 ). After Aziz has left the office and the camera has been turned off I ask Esther what she thinks of the story of how Aziz taught his

have ever been robbed; instead, only the
commercial spaces have been targeted. The newly opened Saudi labour
contractor on the first floor had already installed one camera on its floor.
Mr Al.’s suggestion was to install a total of eight cameras, three at the entrance
hall and one on each floor. This did not seem to me to be a practical solution,
considering the fact that a complete blackout reigns on some floors during
the night, as light bulbs have been stolen too; nor was I sure how the twentyfour-hour video recordings would be monitored and archived. Mr Mus

interviews. We are indebted to Katerina Polychroni for her
invaluable support.
7 Indicative of the arbitrary and uncoordinated procedure for recording migrant burials is
the fact that at different periods there have been different approaches to keeping track
of migrant graves. When shipwrecks were less frequent, the information on the grave
included the nationality and the number of the victim of the specific shipwreck (e.g.
‘Afghan 2’), often on a marble cross taken from a recently exhumed grave of a local.
More recently, with the increase in the number of shipwrecks

the ‘task
at hand’, it is important to remember that there is no such thing as
raw data (Gitelman 2013): that data is always the product of specific
forms of recording within sociotechnical systems such as experimental, financial or manufacturing infrastructures. In systems-theoretical
terms, the data handled by data science is second-order products of
these infrastructures observing themselves or their environments.
As such, practically speaking, it is crucial begin with an abstract,
‘systems-based’ understanding of the algorithmic assemblage under
study as a